


Shake Hands

by TeaCub90



Series: be good to the lad that loves you true [3]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Comfort, Fluff, Gen, Guilty John, Holding Hands, John is a Mess, Post-Episode: s04e02 The Lying Detective, Sherlock Holmes Has Feelings, and is lovely
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-23
Updated: 2019-09-23
Packaged: 2020-10-25 21:23:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20730971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TeaCub90/pseuds/TeaCub90
Summary: There are bruises on his knuckles, and they won’t go away.





	Shake Hands

**Author's Note:**

> This has probably been done a million times before, but TLD makes me protective of Sherlock, every time. EVERY SINGLE TIME.

* * *

There are bruises on his knuckles, and they won’t go away.

They’ve been there for a few days, now – about three, maybe, or four, John can’t quite tell anymore. It’s all a bit of a blur, truth be told; the main priority had been getting Sherlock out of that hospital and into Barts for a day or two, before bringing him home safely to 221b.

It’s only in the quiet moments, when he looks down, and _remembers._

_‘Let him do what he wants. I killed his wife.’_

John shakes his head slightly, twitches his hand as though he could shake those bruises right off somehow, along with the memory of Sherlock in that morgue: his lost, lonely, resigned expression gazing up at him, weak and dulled by ill-suffering and isolation, coughing on his own blood, sweat that might have been tears glimmering over his face.

John sniffs and reaches up, scrubs his own eyes briefly, just as Sherlock himself joins him out of nowhere on his perch on the edge of the sofa, a slightly haggard angel in a blue dressing-gown, fresh from a nap and pressed close. John glances up at him, ready with a smile, or a greeting, or a mildly sarcastic comment, or _something_, but finds suddenly that he can’t really talk.

He drops his head, all too aware of Sherlock looking at him – or rather looking where he’s looking, at his knuckles. Never mind the slick haircut and the blue suits, you only have to look at his knuckles to figure out the kind of man he is. The kind who would kick his best mate when he’s already further down than the deepest pit. The kind who would offer a hand not to help, but to hit.

The kind who cheated on his wife, and then cheated his best mate into thinking her death was somehow all his fault.

He sniffles a little, ashamed to look up; feels Sherlock shift next to him, the softest murmur and then two hands – pale as a trusty white shirt and careful as cotton – are reaching out to cradle his palm.

‘May I?’ Sherlock asks the question politely and John doesn’t answer, doesn’t protest; doesn’t have the energy anymore, just watches what he’s doing. What that is apparently curtails to turning his hand over, bruised-knuckle side up, right up, to the light, despite the twitching desire in John’s palm to turn it over, to hide it. The sunshine is slipping through the windows of 221b, just as it did when they went out for Sherlock’s birthday; John watches it highlight the edge of Sherlock’s black curls in a friendly golden caramel, and wonders – just as he wondered, during his days alone in that bedsit, long ago – if he’ll ever be able to feel that tender heat ever again.

‘I have some cream for that,’ Sherlock comments calmly, finally; John swallows, watching that hand dwarf his. ‘The bottle you brought with you, yesterday.’

He gestures to the mess of medication on the coffee-table in front of him, white boxes of antibiotics and ibuprofen gel and much more besides, which doesn’t help the knot in John’s stomach any. Yesterday, he found himself perfectly able to eat a whole slice of cake after weeks and weeks of barely managing the essentials; now, it’s all slammed back into him again like a punch to his own stomach. It doesn’t help, either, to watch Sherlock reaching for the bottle himself – trying and failing to hide a wince as he does so, a tight flicker of pain creasing his eyes – and John immediately steadies him by the elbow as he straightens up.

‘Easy,’ he murmurs, pointlessly and far too late; finds himself watching dumbly, as Sherlock opens the cap and carefully smears his fingers – should say something maybe; make some form of resistance, remind Sherlock of_ how, _exactly, all of this happened – but then Sherlock reaches out and simply slathers the cream generously over his open hand: stinging for one second and then soothing the next and he hisses, watching the whiteness curtain itself in a cooling layer over his knuckles, directed and steadied by Sherlock’s hand; unwavering, unbreakable, the shapes of his fingers firm, reaching, curling around his own like cats. Anchoring.

This is, by far, the closest John has allowed anyone in weeks. He thinks of these same hands reaching out to comfort, after Mary gasped out her last breath between them; of the way he rejected their ready reassurances, with spite born out of grief. 

‘I see you brought Rosie,’ Sherlock fills the gap smoothly, glancing with an unmistakably fond glance down at her in her travel cot, snoozing away by her father’s feet, oblivious to his torment. ‘Hello, Watson.’ His mouth twitches upwards in a smile; John glances between them, momentarily distracted from the careful pressure of Sherlock’s fingers, instead watching him stare, besotted, at the sleeping baby.

‘She’ll,’ he breathes and tries again; his throat is very tight. ‘She’ll be awake, soon. You – you can hold her, if you like?’ he manages, voice breaking in his attempt to sound normal and unbothered and that Everything is Just Fine.

Except it’s not, except they’re both treading carefully through the wreckage of the past few weeks, over the shattered vow of John’s Hippocratic Oath, cracking beneath their feet and across John’s knuckles, leaving the telltale of his broken promise of _first do no harm,_ a mark, a stigma, a reminder. 

‘Yes, thankyou. There,’ Sherlock concludes cheerfully; puts the cap back on the bottle. ‘That should help a bit.’ He smiles widely, looking pleased with himself, throws the bottle back on the table, his movements becoming blurred to John’s vision. He feels, quite frankly, like a tit, sitting here on the edge of the sofa with his coat still on and his baby dozing by his feet and the doctoring falling to somebody else when it should have fallen to him.

‘John?’ Sherlock’s voice falters and John very determinedly doesn’t look at him; can’t. Then he feels a hand, the tips of fingers, edging close to his in a tentative brush. ‘John? Are you alright?’

He can’t help it; he laughs. A quiet bark of a thing with all the sound and none of the humour and he lifts the hand covered in healing cream, withdraws it from Sherlock’s hopeful touch to shield his own eyes, rub ferociously.

‘I’m sorry,’ he chokes because he is, because he hates this, hates what he’s become; feels the brutal reality of himself in every bone. In his brain; if he’s brave enough to raise his head and look Sherlock in the eye, his face and body stained with the consequences of torrent drug-abuse and the tidal-wave of John’s own anger. ‘I’m so sorry.’ It isn’t this, here, now, that he's apologising for and they both know it. 

‘John…’ A firm voice and a firm hand, tugging his own down and he’s looking straight into Sherlock’s face; soft with something beneath the haggard stubble and the lank hair, a quiet, reckless kind of resolution of one who is prepared to limp back into the lion’s den for the second time after being well and truly mauled the first. John gives an enormous, disgusting sniff; stares into wintry, warm eyes gazing, unmoving, upon him. Feels, on top of his hand, the carefully placed weight of Sherlock’s own palm and suddenly can’t bear it, this forgiveness his friend gives so freely.

‘I…’ John wets his lips, ‘We, uh, we need to call Mike. And Molly – they can –’

‘No,’ Sherlock says bluntly, and John shakes his head at him.

‘I can’t…mate, I can’t just – _waltz _back in here and pretend nothing’s happened –’

‘No,’ Sherlock agrees, firm and final. ‘You’re right, John.’ And just when John thinks this might be it, this might be the moment when Sherlock rightly, fairly, wholly justifiably stands up, tells John that his behaviour has been abhorrent and that Sherlock in no way has to stand for it and would actually like John to piss off and go to Hell now, tit for tat after all, he adds, quite calmly, ‘You can’t waltz; you’re terrible at it.’ John stares; despite himself, he feels the corner of his mouth twitch. ‘When’s your next therapy appointment?’

‘Um,’ John falters, blindsided by the question; good one, that and he blinks before reaching blindly for his phone, looks at the calendar. ‘Tomorrow,’ he confirms, glancing up; tilts the screen to show him. Sherlock nods, looking thoughtful.

‘She’s interesting, this one. Will you make another, after that?’

‘Yes,’ John says immediately, because no-one in their right mind is going to let him stroll about without any form of consultation, the state he’s currently in. Not with the bruises on his hand, not with the mess inside his head he’s trying to get out of and only truly realised he’d sunk into the moment he hit Sherlock; the moment he fulfilled years of an empty threat, an ongoing half-joke that stopped being funny a long time ago. If he was facing himself across the desk of a GP…

_‘Are_ you pretending nothing’s happened?’ Sherlock stays his gaze, voice as even as his eyes. John chuffs, wryly, dropping his gaze; not quite buying it, but appreciating the effort, all the same.

‘I know what you’re doing,’ he chides, cupping his hand around Sherlock’s almost distractedly. Remembers a night long ago, their last night for a long time; running down streets frantic and gasping, handcuffed together, but _together._ John remembers thinking at the time that he would have run beside him even if their hands weren’t forcibly joined. That he would keep on running beside him whatever it took, accusations of falsehood be damned.

Then _things_ happened and they were ripped apart for two years.

‘What _are_ we going to do?’ he asks the question to the gap between their feet, not substantial but not able to look up either. ‘It’s all such a mess.’ A mess like his knuckles; a mess like his brain. A mess that’s perhaps been brewing underneath a thin surface for a long time before bursting with the strain of it all, of Sherlock’s return; of Mary and the consequences of her life that came crashing into theirs.

‘I know,’ is Sherlock’s quiet reply. ‘We’ll sort it all out.’ He sounds extremely sure of himself, running his thumb over those knuckles, almost absent-minded and John smiles sadly, pulling both their joined hands into his own lap.

‘Will we?’ he asks quietly.

_‘_Yes,’ Sherlock says and he smiles, kindly. ‘We always do, in the end.’

It’s hard to tell if he’s speaking generally, or just for them; still, John can’t help but wonder, looking at the medication on the table and at Sherlock’s face, if it’s even true. If things between them have even been any kind of sorted out, at all, for a long time now. If perhaps, all this time, they just clung furiously, ferociously, to what they once had, nails and fingers digging in with dogged determination right at the edge, all the time afraid to face each other properly; to look each other directly in the eye. To talk about it. 

But still – maybe acknowledging that fact is the first step to fixing it.

With that thought, John squeezes Sherlock’s hand in his own – once, twice and smiles a little to feel him squeeze back and while it’s not quite a handshake, it’s _something._ A promise, of sorts, to keep their peace; a pact, to_ talk,_ properly, like adults, in the days and weeks and months ahead.

Just for now, though, he focuses on the safe shape of Sherlock’s palm pressed against his, lifeline against lifeline, beating and defiant – _do no harm –_ and how, with each heartbeat he can hear pulsing in Sherlock’s chest, ricocheting joyfully up to his neck, his wrist, it feels like one step closer to healing.

*


End file.
